Make Money! Make Money!

March 20.

Hong Kong-Macau Ferry Terminal, Ao Territory.

Jiang Miao stepped off the boat with a backpack slung over his shoulders.

The Ao Territory racing center was not far away. He took a few photos with his phone, then leisurely walked to Avenida da Amizade.

Taxis were parked by the roadside.

He casually got into one.

"Taxi, take me to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel."

"Hold on tight, handsome."

Before long, the taxi stopped at the hotel entrance.

Jiang Miao got out with his backpack.

After checking into the hotel, he took another taxi to Casino Lisboa, which was also on Avenida da Amizade.

Its entrance was splendid and glittering.

Carrying a small shoulder bag, Jiang Miao calmly walked into Casino Lisboa.

It was already evening, and there were quite a few guests in the main hall.

He went straight to the counter.

"Give me fifty thousand in chips."

The receptionist glanced at him, accepted the Hong Kong dollars Jiang Miao took out, checked the notes, and handed him fifty thousand in chips.

Having done his research before coming, Jiang Miao did not wander around. After studying the signs for a while, he headed straight for the card tables.

He found a blackjack table and sat down.

"You don't mind if I join, do you?"

"Welcome!" a greasy, potbellied middle-aged man replied with a chuckle.

Another young man with spiky hair took a sip of cola. "Sure, let's play together."

"Handsome, first time here?" another blond-haired man with tattooed arms asked in Cantonese.

"Yeah." Jiang Miao nodded with a smile.

An hour later, Jiang Miao's chips had risen from fifty thousand to three hundred and seventy thousand.

Of the gamblers at the table, everyone except the greasy middle-aged man had been replaced by new arrivals.

Another two hours passed.

Jiang Miao's chips soared again, reaching 1.26 million.

He had dinner at Casino Lisboa, then continued playing for another two hours, leaving him with only 970,000 in chips.

At the counter.

"Cash out the chips and transfer the money directly into my card."

The receptionist smiled and nodded, taking the chips and the bank card he had obtained in Hong Kong the day before. "No problem. Please wait a moment."

More than ten minutes later, Jiang Miao left calmly.

Over the next four days, he visited one casino each day and turned the money in his bank card into 27.38 million.

On the fifth day, he returned to Hong Kong.

He went to a Bank of China branch in Hong Kong.

"Hello, what kind of service do you need?"

"A remittance. It's a relatively large amount."

"Please come to a private room."

Two hours later, Jiang Miao successfully converted 27.38 million Hong Kong dollars into 24.89 million in Red Notes.

Immediately afterward, he sent Little Uncle a WeChat message saying that he had returned to the mainland.

That afternoon, Jiang Miao crossed into Peng City through the border checkpoint with his backpack, then took the high-speed rail. After a little over an hour, he arrived at the downtown high-speed rail station in Hai Lu Feng.

In less than a week, he had completed his initial capital accumulation.

After returning home, he first checked on the eels in the tank, then placed some things he had bought in Hong Kong on the table.

He took a hot shower.

Then he lay on the bed and thought about what to do next.

Now that he had money, although twenty-something million was not much, it was enough to set up a breeding farm in the early stages.

After all, breeding eels required a large site.

Fortunately, Ma Gong Town nearby had a large expanse of fishponds. There had also been plenty of fishponds, shrimp ponds, and oyster ponds around his hometown of Xinxiang, but they had been requisitioned in recent years.

I need at least fifty mu of fishponds. The fishponds near Magong cost around 1,500 yuan per mu per year, so that's roughly 75,000 a year.

Fishpond equipment and materials will probably cost more than one million; building a fully enclosed breeding facility of around five mu will cost about five million.

"And to produce fry quickly, I'll have to buy those semi-mature White Eels. I can't buy Glass Eels. That'll be another expense."

"Then there are labor costs, water and electricity bills, feed, consumables, and medicine. I'll need to set aside at least five million for all that."

"And to ensure eel breeding efficiency, using wild algae would be far too inefficient. I'll have to cultivate the algae myself, which will be another expense."

Jiang Miao recalled that eels required three kinds of algae.

They were Needle-like Blue Fiber Algae, Vaginicola Heterogloea, and Schizochlamys cf. gelatinosa.

In addition, part of the mineral content within the eels had to meet the required standard. If it did not, the eels still would not undergo sexual transformation.

However, minerals were relatively easy to handle.

Jiang Miao picked up a notebook and wrote down, one by one, the things that needed to be purchased or produced himself.

For example, if those algae could be mass-produced directly, there would be no need to use expensive hormones and medicine to induce the eels' sexual transformation.

That was the key to reducing costs and improving efficiency in artificial eel breeding.

At the same time, Jiang Miao knew very well that this technology could not be kept from prying eyes forever.

After all, his breeding farm would need employees, and as long as anyone was interested and spent some money, it would be easy to find out what feed and medicine he used.

Therefore, the eel fry business had to be a quick battle. He had to ship out on a massive scale at the earliest opportunity, swallow the first wave of fast money, and then, once other companies copied the method, drive prices down to razor-thin margins so they would be unable to recoup their costs in the short term.

To do that, the first batch of eel fry shipments had to reach at least one hundred tons and swallow up the entire Asian market.

Jiang Miao had studied eel fry output in recent years. Even at its peak, it had only been sixty or seventy tons.

As long as his company could produce one hundred tons of eel fry annually, other companies would have to think carefully about whether they could turn a profit before entering the market.

After all, market demand was the primary driver.

If the market suddenly had an abundant supply of goods and profit margins were trending downward, other companies would not rush in. Instead, they would hold their money and wait.

Although Jiang Miao attached great importance to the eel fry industry, he did not consider it his core business.

After all, an eel breeding technique like this was difficult to keep completely secret.

While he could use patents to legally restrain some companies, patents for this kind of breeding technology were far too easy to circumvent.

And there was simply no way to monitor those small companies or foreign companies.

Jiang Miao did not want to spend every day fighting lawsuits either, so leveraging the first-mover advantage, followed by a price war later on, was the best choice for now.

After thinking through the general plan.

He decided to ask his brother-in-law for help tomorrow in renting a suitable stretch of fishponds in Magong.

Then he would register a sole proprietorship.

But first, he contacted a patent agency in Peng City online and asked them to help register domestic and international patents for his eel breeding technology.

After agreeing on the price and various details, Jiang Miao sent them a deposit.

The patent would be registered directly under his own name.

After taking care of that, he found a local company registration agency and arranged to meet them the next afternoon.

The reason Jiang Miao was in such a hurry to establish a company was that he did not want to waste his energy on miscellaneous matters.

For example, tasks like finding a patent agency today could be entirely handed over to an assistant. There was no need for him to handle everything personally.

As for the future positioning of the company, Jiang Miao naturally hoped it would become a technology company.

Technological superiority was the true path. Business strategies and schemes were ultimately just minor tricks.

And with the Appraisal System, Jiang Miao possessed an enormous technological advantage.

Therefore, he did not need any business or management geniuses to join him. The only employees he needed were honest, dependable people.